Astronomy Communication Guide

I know most of you know this, but I am writing this blog post for very selfish reasons 🙂 I often time interact with partners where we agree to tag each other’s Facebook pages. In the past, I had to advise on this process several times, and since it keeps coming up, I felt the need to have the steps written somewhere. Instead of doing it on a private document, I thought of writing them here in case you too have to explain to someone how to tag a Facebook page. It’s always easier to send a link, than writing everything from scratch. So here it goes!

Tagging a Facebook page means inserting an embedded link to a Facebook page in your status message, comment, photo description etc. on Facebook. The end result looks like this:

where ESO Supernova is clickable and leads you to the brand page just like in this phrase.

Steps to tag a Facebook page.

1. It is recommended that you first “like” the Facebook page you want to tag, both from your personal Facebook account that is an admin of your Brand Facebook page, as well as on behalf of your Brand Facebook page.

a) Login to Facebook. Go to top main bar, and to the very right, after the three icons for Friends, Messages and Notifications, as well as after the icon for Privacy Shortcuts you will find a little arrow poiting down. Click on it and select Use Facebook as Your Name. Go to the Facebook Page you want to tag and press like. Copy the link of the Facebook Page.

b) Go back to the little arrow and this time select Use Facebook as Your Brand Facebook page. Paste the link of the Facebook Page you’ve just copied. Press like.

2. Go to your Brand Facebook page and start writing the message. When you want to tag a page write @ followed by the name of the page you want to tag. Usually, after you type the first letters, a window will pop up with suggestions of pages, like here:

3. Select the Page you wish to tag. In my case, ESO Supernova

4. Once you have selected the page, you should see this:

5. If your message is all ready to go, press post and you should have the end result above.

Things that can go wrong:

1. Sometimes, Facebook has a hard time finding the page you want to tag. Usually that happens when you or your Brand page have not first liked the page you wish to tag. Other times it’s just a bug and you need to keep trying.

2. Sometimes, you end up with the entire Facebook page name tagged and also a left over from what you typed manually. Like here:

Make sure you delete the extra text, without removing the tag.

That’s it!

And a tip for those of you who knew these things, but had the patience to read all the way until here, we normally tag our own Facebook page in photo credits, to help preserve a link back to our page in the main message, when the image is shared.

I hope this was useful for those who did not know how to tag a Facebook page, and as useful for those who did as it is for me when I need to advise someone on how to do this and have a link who does it for me!

Clear skies,

Oana